Category Archives: education

We have a Sony FS700 hanging around the Digital Anarchy office for shooting slow motion and 4K footage to test with our various plugins ( We develop video plugins for Premiere Pro, After Effects, Avid, Final Cut Pro, Resolve, etc., etc.) . In order to get 4K out of the camera we had to buy an Odyssey 7Q+ from Convergent Designs (don’t you love how all these cameras are ‘4K – capable’, meaning if you want 4K, it’s another $2500+. Yay for marketing.)

(btw… if you don’t care about the back story, and just want to know how to import a corrupted .wav file into a video editing app, then just jump to the last couple paragraphs. I won’t hold it against you. :-)

The 7Q+ overall is a good video recorder and we like it a lot but we recently ran into a problem. One of the videos we shot didn’t have sound. It had sound when played back on the 7Q+, but when you imported it into any video editing application. no audio.

The 7Q+ records 4K as a series of .dng files with a sidecar .wav file for the audio. The wav file had the appropriate size as if it had audio data (it wasn’t a 1Kb file or something) but importing into FCP, Premiere Pro, Quicktime, or Windows Media Player showed no waveform and no audio.

Convergent Designs wasn’t particularly helpful. The initial suggestion was to ‘rebuild’ the SSD drives. This was suggested multiple times, as if it was un-imaginable this wouldn’t fix it and/or I was an idiot not doing it correctly. The next suggestion was to buy file recovery software. This didn’t really make sense either. The .dng files making up the video weren’t corrupted, the 7Q+ could play it back, and the file was there with the appropriate size. It seemed more likely that the 7Q+ wrote the file incorrectly, in which case file recovery software would do nothing.

So Googling around for people with similar problems I discovered 1) at least a couple other 7Q users have had the same problem and 2) there were plenty of non-7Q users with corrupted .wav files. One technique for the #2 folks was to pull them into VLC Media Player. Would this work for the 7Q+?

YES! Pull it into VLC, then save it out as a different .wav (or whatever) file. It then imported and played back correctly. Video clip saved and I didn’t need to return the 7Q+ to Convergent and lose it for a couple weeks.

Other than this problem the Odyssey 7Q+ has been great… but this was a pretty big problem. Easily fixed though thanks to VLC.

I was talking with the owner of a mid-sized effects house in LA last weekend. They’ve always done most of their work where they could get subsidies to pay for part of salaries… Canada, Singapore, etc.

However, the staff for a new production is in Indonesia, where the artists are making $600/mo. They’re already doing production work and it may not be top tier, but it’s good.

Prices for VFX work have been going down for quite a while and it’s probably not going to stop. Yes, there are still jobs in the US, but the trend is moving towards countries where staff can be had for a lot less. The effort to unionize may help, but probably not as much as folks think. An electrician has to be on set. Most VFX work doesn’t require that. It can be done anywhere.

So, where does that leave students? I don’t have a lot of respect for the schools promising careers in VFX. They don’t mention the state of the industry while they’re happily telling students how to fill out the government loan forms. The end result is that you have students graduating these places with a lot of debt and not a lot of job opportunities.

There are jobs for the top graduates, but it’s been my experience that these students would be better off doing online training (www.fxphd.com for example), working on their own projects and getting an internship. They’re probably going to excel no matter where they’re at. These are, of course, the folks that get featured in ‘Alumni Stories’. But instead of ‘Alumni Stories’ I’d much rather see the percentage of ex-students working full time in the VFX industry. The reason you don’t see that statistic is that it’d be pretty depressing.

So if you’re thinking about a career in VFX, before you sign up for $20,000/yr in debt, consider the $600/mo the VFX artists are making in Indonesia. There are other ways to break into the industry than an expensive school. As an artist you may not want to think about finances, but I can assure you… once you have to start paying that back, you’ll be thinking a lot about it.

I recently was chatting with a photographer who pretty much blamed all the ills of the industry on Moms in hot pants. Yep, that’s why he no longer goes to WPPI and why the photo business isn’t what it used to be. Moms in hot pants with their toy DSLRs undercutting real photographers. What IS the world coming to?

(ok, so this is from the Sony advert that’s very funny. See post from last week.)

I think mostly what he’s upset about is a new generation of photographers. I suspect when he got out of school there were a bunch of old photographers bitching about all these kids with their Canon AE-1s running around in bell bottoms pretending to be photographers and working for peanuts.

But change happens. A new generation comes along, new ways of marketing appear, and new cameras are released. Just because you think Twitter is the dumbest thing since the Pet Rock, doesn’t mean you don’t have to use it. (At least Twitter doesn’t limit who’s sees your posts like Facebook does now) Marketing has always been critical in photography and it’s even more so now. It’s just the way of doing it has changed somewhat. It requires a little more consistent engagement… like this blog. Which you’ll note I’m not writing on Facebook. I’ll post the link on FB, but because FB limits who sees it, it much more effective to do the writing here and link to it from the various interwebs.

If a few Moms with Canon Rebels are on the verge of sending you out of business, I don’t think the issue is the Moms. Hell, hire one of them. If you can get in with the Mom Mafia you’re golden!

And besides, given the amount of tradeshows I go to that are nothing but geeky guys, I’m having a hard time seeing what the complaint is about a little gender diversity (hot pants or no). But it’s no secret why you’re seeing a lot of women in photography… they tend to communicate better than men, have more emotional intelligence, and are excellent shooters. I mean, who do you think a bride is going to want to shoot her wedding? The energetic gal in hot pants or the grumpy, old guy? It’s all about being a good communicator these days, whether it’s on social media or during a shoot. Don’t be the grumpy, old guy.

YouTube/Google is opening a full fledged Do-It-Yourself production facility called Creator Space in London and, if rumors are true, Los Angeles.

What does this mean?

The most immediate result is that we will probably see better produced sneezing cat and laughing dog videos. This alone is exciting. Think of the cat videos we can get with a full cyc greenscreen! The possibilities stagger the mind.

Seriously though, there’s not a lot of info about it, but the promo video doesn’t give me reason to believe any post houses or production facilities should be sweating it too hard.

In the previous post I mention an article from NPR: Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood. In that article they quote filmmaker Tim Chey as saying: “We do it for the art, we do it because we want to tell our stories, express our stories. I, as a filmmaker, am not in it for the money.”

Awesome! Then why are you complaining about piracy? You want people to hear your stories. You’re not in it for the money. Pirates are just enabling more people to see your movie that otherwise would play at two arthouse theaters on each coast and then be forgotten. What exactly is the problem?

However, somehow I feel he’s not being completely honest about not being in it for the money.

The biggest problem that most artists run into is that if they want to be even remotely successful, they need to look at themselves as a business. This kind of sucks. Most artists became artists because they didn’t want to think about marketing, business plans, how to accept credit cards, who they have to pay off to get in a gallery, etc. Sadly, that’s the hard, cold reality of it. Either you learn how to market yourself, you give up a good chunk of your earnings to someone that will market for you (like a gallery), or you starve. (or I suppose you can subsist in a coffee shop making pretty patterns in the latte foam of hipsters who go ‘Wow, that’s cool. You should be an artist!’)

This is a repost from the Final Cut Pro List. While I can’t take credit for it, it definitely has similar sentiments to some of the things I’ve posted about education. I think internships are a huge part of anyone’s education, regardless of whether you’re going to a $1500/year community college or spending $25,000/yr on a fancy art school. But obviously you need to make the most of those internships. Here are some rules for making that happen.

Originally posted by Mark Raudonis. Mark is a former intern now working in Hollywood.

1. You are here for a short time… make every minute count.
2. If you find yourself stuck doing Xeroxing, it’s your own fault. Be proactive about
your time, your schedule, and what you want to learn.
3. Nobody is going to “hand you” an experience, you create it yourself.
4. You’re onstage here. You may be watching us, but we’re watching you. Make a good impression.
5. Watching someone edit is like watching paint dry. It’s boring! Ask questions. Engage in the creative process. “Outthink” the editor to the next shot.
6. You’re future career DEPENDS on your colleagues. Get to know them. They will be your best source of information for your next job.
7. There are plenty of editors here. Learn something different for each of them.
8. We’re in the communication business. Start by learning to communicate with the team.
Know, understand, and practice communication… and I don’t mean texting!
9. Technology is NOT your enemy. Learn enough about what we use to become confident in using the tools of our trade.
10. Organization is the key to creativity. If you can’t find something, you can’t even begin to be creative. Learn how we organize our projects, our SAN, our servers.

Finally, have fun! I was an intern once. It was one of the best experiences of my career.